Apr 25, 2022
I’ve Been Asked by Wiki to Write an Article
I just don’t know that I want to work that hard.
It all started when there was…wait for it…nothing to read here and nothing to watch on YouTube. So as I always do I work on my family tree. I was tooling away on it yesterday when I came across Marquard III von Ems. Marquard aka Mark is my 18th great-grandfather. He lived and died in Germany. Geni.com had hardly anything on him but I copied and pasted as much as they had. THe snag came when in the one or two sentence bio of his I saw his cause of death.
Murder.
Mind you he isn’t the first or only one on my tree who has been murdered. In total there are now 60. This does not include people like Anne Boleyn who was beheaded (she’s one of 36), killed in battle of which there are 96. Then those that were assassinated (11) and those that died of the plague (2 ) and 6 were hanged some of which were no doubt from the witch trials. And it goes on from there.
However, back to grand-dad Mark, they gave no explanation of who murdered him, how, or why. Google and I had a play date together for a bit and I still couldn’t find any info in general on Mark let alone any specifics. So I shot Wiki an email that said
Geni has some lame listing for my 18th GGF. It is stated there that he was murdered but gives no further details. I’ve used Google to locate more info on him as well as Find a Grave but have come up empty. Can someone write a piece about him for Wiki?
I figured they have scholars who volunteer there and no doubt have resources I don’t that someone could surely find some info on him and write a piece even if it were short. But no.
The subjects for our articles are usually chosen by the editing community rather than by request. If however the entry qualifies under our encyclopedic notability guidelines <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:N>, and you can cite reliable, published, 3rd party sources <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RS>, you can suggest the creation of it to our volunteers at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RA>.
That was the first paragraph of the email I got back. Basically, ‘hey Terry. You write it and cite it and our editors will publish it.’
Now, why does that sound familiar?
If I’m doing all of the heavy lifting then guess what? My ass is publishing it and taking credit for it myself. Since I couldn’t find any information online it could mean going first to the local library and getting the librarians to help me dig and then maybe even to the local college to do some digging.
Worst-case scenario I can use what Geni has and put that hodgepodge into cohesive sentences. Throw in his connection to the US via his descendants. And then leave a whole lot of [citation needed] throughout like I’ve seen on so many other articles before.
Does anybody have any other ideas on how I could locate info on Granpa?
